Lots of exciting changes happening around here!
Updates and new information will be available in early 2017.
Avenue Art Days & Art DOG
Woof!
Avenue Art Days – Douglas Design District
This Friday, DeafKAN will be joining 19 other muralists to create an ASL mural in downtown Wichita! This is a big deal, friends.
Not only will we be enjoying the company of two amazing Deaf artists, Heidi Storme and Adrian Buentello, but we will be making our mark on the community with DEAF ART.
That really rocks our world.
The great thing is, you can join us! We will be at Jimmy’s Egg restaurant on Douglas Ave/Hydraulic.
Friday–5pm to 8pm
Saturday–9am to 5pm
So, what is Art DOG?
Art Day Of Giving=Art DOG. This is a 24-hour giving campaign created by the Wichita Community Foundation to raise awareness of the needs of various charities in Wichita. CLICK HERE to visit our page and learn more about this amazing opportunity to join hundreds of other generous individuals to raise over 1.17 million dollars in just one day.
ASL Book Group and Cutest Baby Drawing
Baby, I Love You!
Baby, I Love You Campaign
Our annual Baby, I Love You campaign has begun! We are selling our favorite ILY baby teethers from Little Sapling Toys to raise funding for our upcoming ASL Education Program. We hope to launch by 2018 or earlier!
Cost of these non-toxic, made in the USA, handcrafted baby teethers is
only $13 or buy 3 for $33. BUY NOW
Campaign Goal #1: ASL Education Program
This program will be a researched based, bilingual-approach program designed to support the family and the child. We will also be teaching community classes as well. The goal is to have salaried, qualified instructors to manage and teach the classes.
Campaign Goal #2: Early Access Awareness
We hope to educate and inspire families to choose American Sign Language for their little ones. We’ll be posting some information and resources that might help in your journey.
We’re having a Cutest Baby Contest!
Send us photos of your cute babies and we will enter you in our drawing for three incredible prizes!
- $50 gift card to Sweet Cheeks Momma & Baby Boutique (online orders and shipping available!)
- Baby Sign Lanugage DVD Set
- ILY Baby Teether by Little Sapling Toys
Winners will be announce at our Book Group on Feb. 27th at 11 am at Watermark Books & Cafe. $7 for light lunch and discussion of Finding Zoe: A Deaf woman’s journey of love, identity and adoption.
*USA residents only.
Wins for Kansas Grant
We are thrilled to share our good news! Deaf Kids’ Art Network was recently granted the Wins for Kansas grant in the amount of $500. Thank you, DeVaughn James and Kakeland Cares!
You can see our Executive Director and founder, Heidi Howard being interviewed and handed the giant check right here:
Sadly, captioning isn’t available after it airs. So we’ve typed it up ourselves the best we can!
Transcript from KAKEland Cares and Wins for Kansas 2016:
(NEWSDESK) (WINS FOR KANSAS ON NEWS SCREEN)
MIKE IUEN: …..helping kids who are deaf connect with positive role models. Chris Stanford has more in this week’s Wins for Kansas.
(DEAFKAN LOGO)
CHRIS STANFORD (OFF CAMERA): DeafKAN stands for Deaf Kids’ Art Network. The nonprofits mission is to promote deaf culture and sign language through art and performance to children that have hearing loss.
(ON SITE INTERVIEW)
HEIDI HOWARD: “…okay, so it’s not so scary, this is alright. Deaf are educated, they’re talented and it’s a good role model for my children. I’m not afraid to be around that.
(PHOTOS OF DEAFKAN EVENTS)
CHRIS STANFORD: “DeafKAN puts on different workshops throughout the year and is about to try something new.
(ON SITE INTERVIEW)
HEIDI HOWARD: Inner Beauty Boot Camp for Deaf teen girls and their friends can come. We’re going to learn about makeup and fashion but also more important things about kindness, and uh, self-esteem…”
(ON SITE CHECK PRESENTATION) (DUSTIN DEVAUGHN LEFT, HEIDI HOWARD CENTER, RICHARD JAMES RIGHT)
DUSTIN DEVAUGHN: DeVaughn James Injury Lawyers is very thankful to DeafKAN and all the work you do in our community.
HEIDI HOWARD: Thank you so much. This means the world to us.
RICHARD JAMES: Congratulations!
(PHOTOS FROM DEAFKAN EVENTS)
HEIDI HOWARD (OFF CAMERA): “I was shocked! I was so excited! (laughs) That was wonderful, and I saw it and I was like, Oh, I wish we could have that and suggested it to a few friends that they nominate us. And they did and we got the call and it was just…it was an exciting moment.
CHRIS STANDFORD (OFF CAMERA): For Kakeland Cares, I’m Chris Stanford.
(RETURN TO STUDIO DESK)
MIKE IUEN: And to learn more about DeafKAN, just head to Kake.com and click on ‘Find It’.
Sweet Sixteen, what will you bring?
Happy New Year!
2015 was an exciting year for the Deaf community:
- Nyle DiMarco Wins the final season of America’s Next Top Model CLICK HERE
- This 8 yo basketball phenom makes it to Nationals CLICK HERE
- Caleb McDuff, 7 yo kart racer from England signs pro with WIX. Like and follow them on Facebook HERE
- Deaf actors make a huge impact on Broadway with the blended cast of hearing/deaf actors inthe production of Spring Awakening. READ
- We followed Deaf world travelers Calvin Young and Joel Barish in their adventures. HERE and HERE
- Business owners like Sarah Snow from Glide app setting a positive example of asking the Deaf community for feedback on the app. Follow her HERE.
We salute the men and women and children who dared to dream in 2015. They shed a positive light on the wonderful things in the Deaf community that are happening all the time.
In 2016, we will do our best to continue highlighting these positive Deaf role models for you.
From our volunteer family to yours,
we wish you a very Happy New Year in 2016!
From the Director’s Chair: Can you read my lips?
My whole life I’ve been a lip reader. A pretty darn good one, too. I have faked it my whole life. It’s the biggest reason I make it.
Growing up, I thought everyone could read lips. I was shocked when I learned that not very many people read lips and further shocked when I realized that not many Deaf people do either. I take it for granted, really. It’s also the reason I am a great speller. I see the letters rolling off the lips and tongues of everyone I meet. I can pick up their accents by the shape of their vowels. I can’t hear their s’s but I can see them.
Speech therapy was not very helpful. Again and again trying to say those confounded s’s. Sometimes I could hear it, sometimes I couldn’t. Sometimes I got it right, sometimes I didn’t. I didn’t know what worked and what didn’t. I still don’t know what my tongue is supposed to do when I use the letter ‘s’. All I see are the top teeth and the bottom teeth coming together like a bad smile.
Not to mention, I still feel get a panicky feeling when I see these things:
Did you know that only 30% of the English language is visible from the exterior? And even then, b’s look like p’s. And a glottal g looks like the letter k. Those are only two examples. A popular game has surfaced on YouTube lately where one person puts on noise-canceling headphones to block the sound while the friend reads a word. The object of the game is to try to guess the word by reading the lips. Jimmy Fallon has done it on his show numerous times. Some videos are offensive and not appropriate to share on our site but for the most part, it’s people just having fun. While I know that some in the Deaf community don’t care for this game, I think this game has the potential to raise awareness of the difficulty of lip reading.
My blind friend and I had an interesting (and short) conversation. He is a master pianist and is off-the-charts incredible with hearing any song and then being able to play it. He can even match a singer’s pitch with the piano. It’s remarkable. So naturally, his world is very auditory.
One day, as I’m driving him home I told him that I have a hard time saying my s’s and how even my kids have tried to help me say them correctly. He immediately said, “Well, just make a hissing sound really loud like this,” and then proceeded to hiss. I laughed. I told him, “That’s like me telling you to squint really hard so you can see.” He got kinda quiet and we didn’t really talk about it anymore. I didn’t think I sounded defensive but there was definitely an awkward silence after that.
This video resonates strongly for me in such a positive way. So often, the responsibility of communication falls on the person who has the least ability to communicate verbally. The rest of the world looks at you, waiting for you to catch up. When you don’t, they move on and say, “Never mind.”
It’s a great watch:
CAN YOU READ MY LIPS? from Little Moving Pictures on Vimeo.
Here is another video that addresses the pain of hearing the words “never mind” after a lot of effort to communicate. WATCH HERE
Make a Mug With Us
We are getting MUGGED! Wichita State University art student, Kaylee Bond, will be teaching our families how to make their very own mugs. We will be mixing up our very own hot chocolate mix to take home with us and wrapping things up with homemade soup and rolls.
There is still room to sign up, DeafKAN families! Email Heidi Howard at heidi.deafkan@gmail.com
$8/person (includes mug, hot chocolate and soup)
Happy November!
You know what makes us feel cozy? Dreaming about who will be the winner of our beautiful, handmade Gingersnap Quilt next year. TICKETS ARE ON SALE NOW! Click HERE to be directed to our (NEW!) Quilt Raffle Tickets page. Come back often to increase your chances of winning.
To show off the quilt, we made this winter-inspired video.
https://animoto.com/play/dIRZz2MbXu0UnRiuXpSrDQ
Final Friday Success
An Executive Director’s Diary Entry
Dear Diary,
Final Friday at The Renfro Studio was an amazing event. We could not have predicted how things would go, this being our first art gallery and all. Setting up took a little longer than expected so we were a little sweaty and frazzled but who cares when people are streaming in to see our art and bid on the Community Canvases? We sold almost every painting!! And we raised $1,200 in one night!
We are getting closer to raising $16,000 for 2016 than before. We can do this!!
Our greeting card idea was a hit. It’s not easy for everyone to be able to bid and buy a painting, so having a collection of all 8 paintings in one set of cards for only $20 was a great way for folks to have a piece of our art from the last two years. I know these will go quickly. We are definitely going to do this every year–and add more of the kids’ art next year!
The Gingerbread Quilt looked fabulous and the tickets really sold! We are so lucky to be able to have this as a fundraiser. We are going to have so much fun selling tickets all year and drawing a winner at next year’s Deaf Awareness Event. I hope we can raise $2,000-$3,000 with this quilt!
We were so happy to see old friends and meet new ones. There sure are some great people in our community. The Lion’s Club came and we were able to present them with an certificate of appreciation and get a photo with them.
We also had ASL students there and lots of people from off the street, plus our own friends and supporters.
The sign language cookies turned out totally great. Adrienne from Sweet Creations did a fantastic job and Kit Corby was a doll to donate these to us!
We can’t thank Tracey Cohn from The Renfro Studio enough!! She is so much fun to work with–we’re so glad we were able to use her studio and have her take photos for us. (Note to self: I think I’ll ask her to do our family portraits)
It was exciting to be on both KAKE and the Brett & Sierra Show to promote our event. A few people came to our event because they saw us on TV–mission accomplished! Our DeafKAN kids were so incredible being on TV. I couldn’t be prouder of those boys.
And our volunteers. Where would we be without our volunteers??
Sigh. I am one lucky director.
It was a beautiful Fall evening and we can’t wait to do this again in the Spring for Art Day of Giving (Art DOG).
Love,
Heidi Howard, Executive Director & Founder
Deaf Kids’ Art Network, DeafKAN
P.S. We still have two paintings available (but I know they won’t last long…)
“Otha”
“Nature”
DeafKan 